Microplastics: How Much is There Really?

A recent study discovered that nitrile gloves were adding to the microplastics measurement. From Analytical Methods:

Quality assurance and control measures – including wearing gloves when handling laboratory materials and samples – seek to reduce overestimating microplastic abundance. However, commonly used laboratory gloves release non-volatile residues, including stearate salts, that exhibit vibrational spectra similar to microplastics. In this work, we illustrate that dry surface contact with nitrile and latex laboratory gloves can cause overestimations of microplastics (mean 2000 false positives per mm2) when using traditional library matching approaches.

Is there an actual problem with microplastics.  Likely less but how do we really know. A little panic goes a long ways